Cheney: 'We got it right'

His last campaign is an unyielding defense of his legacy, after years of reveling in what he calls his “Darth Vader image.” Dick Cheney says he knew critics and historians would tear apart his new book, but that he wrote it so his seven grandchildren would know why he did what he did.

“Not only do [critics] want apologies,” he told POLITICO during an interview in the airy living room of his McLean mansion, with a statuette of a buffalo nearby and a couple of dogs underfoot. “They want the apologies to be on matters they disagreed with you on — on policy.”

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“It’s not good enough if you say, ‘Well, when I was a young man, I had a misspent youth. I got kicked out of Yale twice, arrested twice for driving under the influence,’ ” he continued. “I had to straighten my life out. It’s a pretty big mistake that I admit, and talk about very freely in my book. That’s not good enough: It’s got to be some policy issue where they disagreed with you. And I’m not apologetic with respect to the policies of the Bush administration. I think we basically got it right.”

Eight years in the White House, two wars that are still dragging on — and zero mistakes?

“I didn’t say no mistakes,” he replied. “But … from the standpoint of what I wanted to put down, what I knew about, what I was intimately involved in, I think we got it right.”

Cheney, 70, may know more of the nation’s secrets than any living person: He had four decades of briefings as a member of the House intelligence committee, White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford, defense secretary during Desert Storm and vice president in the age of terror.

He rewarded aides who avoided the press, and rarely talked himself. Now, he’s talking — in the pages of “ In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” written with his older daughter Liz Cheney, and during a book tour that is taking him across the country.

Reflecting Cheney’s long and varied tenure on the public stage, just 217 of the memoir’s 527 pages are devoted to the two Bush administrations.

The book was written as Cheney battled what he calls in the book “end-stage heart failure,” which at one point left him unconscious for two weeks. Cheney’s heart now pumps with the aid of a battery-powered device that is typically used as a bridge to a heart transplant.

Cheney said he is considering seeking a transplant, which would be a risky and controversial procedure for someone of his health and age, but hasn’t decided.

“Right now, I’m doing very well with the heart pump — had it for over a year,” he said. “It’s doing what it’s supposed to do, so I haven’t made any other decisions.”

On when he has to decide, he said: “That’s between me and my doctors.”

Asked if he believes in an afterlife, Cheney said simply: “I do.”

Friends say Cheney may be motivated to re-inject himself in the public dialogue if he detects a notable departure on national-security policy, or if he sees some major injustice to officials who helped in the Bush administration war on terror.

But he has largely retreated from politics. Some of the 2012 Republican candidates have called him — he won’t say which ones — but he doesn’t plan to campaign. Neither he nor former President George W. Bush indulge the sort of long-distance political kibitzing that former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton enjoy.